“It’s easier doing those scenes with another gay man than it is a straight man. The same way I feel fine doing sex scenes with a woman. When I’m doing a sex scene with an actor who is straight, I feel a huge sense of responsibility not to feel like I’m taking advantage or anything. Like, I’ll only touch their balls if it says so in the script.”

Of course, there was an intimacy coordinator on set, but Tovey says he was never uncomfortable filming the show’s most explicit scenes, including one in which he makes out and whips a character played by straight actor Zach Meiser. “There is an anxiety that kicks in that you go, ‘This is a straight guy, I’m a gay guy, openly, and we’re going to be kissing now.’ And we did it and then his tongue slipped in and then they cut and he went to me, ‘I just slipped my tongue in there…Is that all right?’ I said, ‘If it’s all right with you.’”

They continued shooting the sequence. “The next time we did it, I was like, ‘This guy is up for it! This guy’s committed. I absolutely love this, let’s go for it!’  So then we are like eating each other’s face, tongue in each other’s face. At one point I thought, ‘I’m going to spit in his mouth. No, don’t do that. That’s too much.’ I had to hold back. That’s when you get in trouble.”Talking about preparing for the sex scenes on Looking

“I keep the bush low, trim the chest hair and I like to get the nipples more erect, so I’ll tweak them a bit too,” he revealed. “Erect nipples add so much to a scene I think. I do worry about how I’m going to look in screen-grabs and GIFS. You know it’s going to happen.”